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He’ll fall between the cracks of the bustling wall of insurmountable tasks that occupy, absorb and demand your undivided attention.

You’ll go from thinking about him at every waking moment of your mundane life, to forgetting what his voice sounds like.

You’ll trade memories of uncontrollable laughter for tranquility that comes from his absence.

You’ll stop dreaming about how wonderful it felt to simply hold his hand, to touch his face, to be the recipient of his dazzling smile that filled your dark life with rainbows.

You’ll forget.

Try as you may, days, months and years later, you will fail to recall what was it that made you fall in love. You will scratch your head and wonder, laughing at your own ignorance, trying to sift through your cluttered consciousness for reasons that could possibly explain why you chose to jump off the cliff, knowing you could very well never survive a fall from that high.

Somewhere in the chaos, an answer will emerge. You will not appreciate the candor of your intellect. You will throw it away, rummaging the depths of your past for an easier answer. An answer that would fit into this puzzle like a perfect piece.

Yet, in your soul, you know the reason.

That there was no reason to begin with.

You jumped off that cliff, holding his hand, looking into his eyes, knowing that your death won’t come from the fall, but from drowning in the endless abyss of his oceanic blue eyes.

And just when you thought you’d forgotten it all, you’ll be swept by those flooding waves of memories again and again, till you get tired of thrashing about in it, and drown.

Sometimes, I get sleepy. So sleepy, that lying down on the bed and surrendering to the bliss of slumber is the only thing I have strength left for.

Sometimes, I get hungry. So hungry, that even onions seem delicious, and I can’t stop eating onions till my breath starts to smell enough to make me sick.

Sometimes, I like to stare into space. Just stare, and dream, building castles in the air and destroying them just as quickly.

Sometimes, I like to walk. I walk and walk and walk till my feet ache and I forgot where I came from. The only thing keeping me going is the assurance that there’s really nowhere to go to.

Sometimes, I like to talk. I call up every friend I know, and ask them questions about Life, the Universe and Everything.

Sometimes, I like being alone. I lie to my friends who want me to go for a night out because I just want some time to myself.

Sometimes, I feel lazy. So lazy, that I skip meals, refuse to bathe, socialize or do anything remotely human, because being a cushion is so much better.

Sometimes, I feel scared. I hurry through the dark corridors of my home, hating my tiny bladder that forced me to wake up in the middle of the night and wander the corners of my house that are cozy during the day but sinister once the lights are out.

Sometimes I cry. I cry because I am hurt, I cry when I’m angry, I cry when I feel lonely and I cry for no reason at all.

Sometimes, there is no reason for my actions, no plausibility for the way I behave.

It’s plain and simple: the very sight of her fills you with fury. Your temples throb, your blood pressure rises, and you want to inexplicably punch something, someone. Her.

She is everything you aren’t. She is hailed as the perfect woman, while you struggle to be a girl first. You are smart, but she is smarter. You are pretty, but she is prettier. You are kind, but she is selfless. You don’t hold a candle to her perfection.

You hate her.

Everything about her is infuriating. Her stupid little face, her fake smile, her obviously touched up photos, her pricey little designer wear that you can’t afford, her quiet charm, her tinkling laughter and warm demeanor that strongly contrast your own boorish, loud and blunt personality.

You make yourself believe she’s not smart, or pretty or nice. You know you’re only fooling yourself, because everyone else believes in her. You beg people who don’t know her, plead with them to tell you that you’re prettier, wittier, better.

They do. Reluctantly.

You try to figure out why you hate her, where the negative emotions towards her originated. Was it that time when everyone else told you that you look pretty but her? Or the time she didn’t find your universally amusing tale funny? Or that time she stuck up her snide little nose and snorted at your pathetic attempts to win her approval?

Why is her approval important?

“She is not pretty, she is not smart, she is not a better person than I am.” This has become your litany. You dream every night of the various ways to make her feel small, and yourself feel important. More important. The comparative adjective is not to be forgotten.

You hate her, a liquid boiling hatred that envelopes your intestines, spreads in your lungs, and comes out of your nostrils in a jet of hot air, making your face flame up and your head pound.

One day she will forget you, and her absence will make you happy.

But you will always remember the way she made you feel. Like a murderer.

On his best day, someone labelled him to be of average intelligence. On his worst, he nursed the wounds of his bruised ego by smashing tube lights and throwing paint on a blank canvas.

She, on the other hand, was beautiful. She never believed it though, because she didn’t own clothes that clung to her body in the right places or heels that made certain parts of her body jut out at the right angles.

He waded through the murky pool of his life, dragging his body with all the effort he could muster. But where was he pushing himself? In what direction? He never could say.

She was something of an antithesis. A walking paradox. She liked dreaming, but she often pricked the balloon of her imaginations with the piercingly sharp needle of her realism. She claimed that fantasy was implausible.

He cried at night, because society forbade him to do so during the day. He was a man to the world, but in the privacy of his bedroom, surrounded by the darkness and the looming shadows of his demons, he was a boy.

She liked to think of herself as wise, but the world and her actions prompted the opposite to be what came to define her. She had a perfectly reasonable explanation for it. But the world, she complained, never heard her out. On the one rare day she was allowed to speak, she could muster nothing but a curious sound.

When they met, it was the stuff of dreams and American Rom-Coms. He thought she was stunning, while she thought he was wonderful. Her smile made him happy and his eyes helped her dream. They defined bliss by what they had together.

The world laughed at them, calling them stupid, ugly, sissy and naive.

Of all the thoughts that ran through her mind, the one that she entertained most often was that of how flawlessly ordinary she was. She was average in all respects, unexceptional at everything. She felt unintelligent when she engaged in conversation with her friends, who, she believed, tolerated her merely because she was a yes-man. She felt unattractive more than twice a day, surrounded by hordes of pretty women whose perfect bodies made her feel awkward in her own skin, whose beauty outshone her own undistinguished looks. She felt uninspired, she knew she was going to be another face in the crowd, her friends far ahead of her, disappointment etched in the faces of everyone she knew, but most pronounced in her own. She was severely unambitious, her life was a lump of clay in her hands- a lump she did not know how to mould. She called herself unimaginative, never one to produce anything sparkling, witty or even remotely creative.

She was mediocre. She could taste it in her mouth- a dull, lifeless, vanilla flavour.

Eventually, she learnt to accept it. She became the best among the mediocre.

It was a Wednesday, when Riley saw the dead pigeon. Unlike her friend who was with her at the time and openly expressed her disgust and discomfort at the sight of the rotting corpse, Riley felt a happiness that seemed to fill her entire being with pure and complete satisfaction. She knew better than to openly express this perverse joy.

Riley did not ever feel this way before, and she began to create opportunities like this, whereby she could see the carcass of a pigeon and feel alive at the sight of the death of a helpless bird. She became the feared and dreaded Pigeon Hunter.

Four Wednesdays later, when Riley’s mother knocked on her bedroom door, she expected the usual sight of her daughter sleeping soundly in her newly purchased grey bed.

Instead, she was greeted by the sight of Riley floating in a pool of blood, surrounded by numerous pigeon feathers, and a single note with the words “Karma is a pige.”

Everything must have a beginning, or so I am told. Beginnings are overrated phases in the process of any action or event. Much like their antitheses, endings. We are so deeply drawn to the nostalgia that beginnings offer and so vary of the finality of endings, that we squander away what lies between these two extremes.

The beginning of this blog is, therefore, unimportant. I wish it to be so, because I do not want to regret it one day, nor do I want it to be so promising that the succeeding posts disappoint me or anyone else who cares to read them.

I am not particularly good at anything, I am a severely average writer. I’d like to describe myself as mediocre, but more on that later. This blog does not aim to please anyone or achieve anything, and my harshest critics may call it feckless.